“Before many days are past,” Karma warns in her lowest, most annoying tone of superior knowledge, “you will see signs and portents in the Las Vegas night sky.”
Right, the Treasure Island curbside volcano spitting fake fire far into the dry desert air.
“You will face alien abduction.…”
“That already happened to me in Chicago, where the mob is an entire other species of lame.”
“You will dance with the dead down a ten-story mountain.…”
Manx, is this lady on another plane, probably a discontinued SST! Nobody measures mountains in stories, but in feet.
Karma condescends to slit open one peeper. “That is a metaphor, Louie.”
“Metaphor, mountain, right. All this is really interesting, Karma, but I have some bothersome, buzzing houseflies to catch on the first floor.”
And a few zzzzz’s.
“Duty calls,” I say, braving the tickle of fronds as I leap onto the palm tree trunk and ratchet back down to my quarters.
“You are due for a great fall,” Karma’s fading voice calls as I flee.
I am not worried, although her whines of gloom and doom and my hasty retreat cause me to lose two nail sheaths on the way back down.
How come the mighty Karma did not predict that?
Chapter 2
Phoning Home
Temple yawned. It was only midmorning, but Midnight Louie had been thrashing about half the night, giving her dreams of being entangled by a giant furry black octopus.
The cat who deigned to live with her, a solid black, solid twenty-pound guy with a knack for showing up where needed, thumped atop her desk. Midnight Louie nosed her business cards aside to sprawl belly-down on the cool surface.
She eyed the smartphone on her desk as if it were a particularly large insect despite the serene graphic of nearby Red Rock Canyon on the home screen. She’d donned her headset because she expected this long-put-off call to last awhile. She didn’t want to fry her brain … or her ear, which was already hot, and probably red. Her fingertips on the desktop were white. And cold.
Honestly!
Her gaze lingered on a pile of her business cards: TEMPLE BARR, PR.
Why was she indulging in cold feet now? She’d once done live stand-ups as a TV reporter, had repped a prestigious repertory theater where she ran into movie stars, for gosh sakes. She’d been a public relations freelancer in super-hyped, larger-than-life Las Vegas for more than two years. She was smart, single, successful, and had even developed a reputation as an amateur sleuth to the point that a homicide lieutenant had actually called upon her services a time or two.
If Oprah Winfrey—or Larry the Cable Guy, for gosh sakes—called right now, Temple could do an instant interview with either one. Or both at a time. She was a media maven and she’d had eluded murderers attempting to flame-roast her in a burning room only recently. Well, one murderer.
So why did she find phoning home so intimidating? Temple would be thirty-one in a couple of months. Past thirty and way past the age of consent.
Louie bent over to apparently study the cell phone screen displaying her “Family” contacts. One big black paw patted it.
“No claws,” she warned, her hand snatching up the phone to safety.
Louie backed away, lifting a forepaw innocent of claw tips.
“Sorry, boy. I’m a little nervous.”
Just do it, Temple told herself.
Temple tapped the familiar number in Minneapolis and waited for the ring. On Saturday her father and brothers would be off doing man things, like attending her nephews’ and nieces’ soccer games, performing strange rituals with their heads buried in vehicle motors, and sitting in battered wooden motorboats on lakes, pestering fish while mosquitoes pestered them.
Karen Barr should be home alone now, maybe doing accounts for her antique mall stand or … baking oatmeal-raisin cookies. Temple had such a sudden craving for those warm, homemade oatmeal-raisin cookies, her stomach spasmed and her mouth watered.
These autonomic system flare-ups were ridiculous. She called home every few weeks, but … But she hadn’t been back to visit since coming to Las Vegas.
“Temple,” her mother’s voice hummed into her overheated ear. “I thought that might be you.”
“Hi, Mom. How are you all doing?”
“Fine. The weather is warming up, so all the boys are out. We had hardly any snow this winter.”
“I never thought global warming would hit Minnesota.”
“So what’s new in your world? Triple-digit heat numbers yet?”
“Not yet. Luckily, you don’t have to shovel sweat. And it’s a dry heat in this climate.”
“I guess there’s no prying you out of Sin City.”
Good. Her mom had given Temple an out from this awkward conversation.
“There probably is, Mom,” she said. “I was thinking about coming up.”
“That’s wonderful! Any special reason?”
“One.”
“You’re not changing jobs?”
“Nooo…” Temple could have said she was changing boyfriends, but she knew better than to drop the fiancé bomb right away. “I do have someone I want you to meet.”
“Someone?” Her mother’s voice was suddenly guarded. “Kit said you were the social butterfly of the Strip.”
“What? Kit said that? When did you talk to Aunt Kit?”
“A lot of times. Temple. We are sisters.”
“So you two talk about me?”
“Sometimes.”
“And?”
“She said you’d really settled into that over-the-top city. That you had some key clients and a lot of friends. She particularly mentioned a big Italian family named Fontana that had given you a lot of PR commissions. I was so glad to hear that.”
Oh, Aunt Kit, you devil you. Her mother was imagining a “Mamma Mia knows best” clan when the sophisticated Fontanas were Vegas venue owners and more like the Sopranos, but in a good way.
Obviously, Kit hadn’t mentioned she herself had recently married the eldest of the mob of dreamy Fontana brothers. Their dark Italian good looks, attired in pale Ermenegildo Zegna designer suits, had become a Vegas brand for smooth, single, and sexy.
Temple understood why her aunt had kept mum with Karen. Kit had been a New York City single until sixty and then had married a younger man. Aldo Fontana was a much younger man. If Temple didn’t have her own guy, she’d consider her aunt an ideal role model.
“Well, I’m used to having big brothers,” Temple said, thinking of her hulking outdoorsy four, “and there are ten Fontana brothers.”
“Mamma mia. Those Italians do reproduce! But I’m glad you still have ‘older brothers’ to take you under their wings.”
“Sometimes, Mom. I take them under my wing.”
Sometimes family couldn’t see you as independent and grown up, particularly if you were the youngest and only daughter of five.
“Say, speaking of big families,” Temple said, “I never did find out why you and Dad had so many of us. A little out of step with the ‘small footprint’ philosophy of the times, although I’ve seen my birth footprint and it was tiny.”
“Oh.” A pause. “I suppose it was because we really wanted a daughter.”
“You mean you were holding out for a girl the way families always used to hold out for a boy?”
“Yes.”
“Way more liberated of you than I suspected, Mom.”
“Thank you. I think. So who is this someone you want us to meet?”
“Well, duh. My fiancé.”
A really long pause. The family had met Max, but had not been so enamored as Temple. No one could have been as enamored as much as Temple at that point, but her family would have resented anyone who’d take her out of the Twin Cities, especially to someplace as glitzy as Vegas.